Atlanta’s Post-War Urban Renewal:

Stone’s Governing Atlanta is best known for its presentation (creation) of an approach to urban politics: regime politics — regime approach, for the most part, is not our primary concern at this point although it will be partially presented in this case study. Stone’s contribution to us is his recognition that in this case urban renewal structures (in particular the Mayor and his bureaucratic entities are responsive to a vast array of broader social and political forces both within and external to Atlanta. Urban renewal as it played out in Atlanta is best explained by the interaction of these social forces, affected constituencies, and political leadership and external structures and forces as well. In this manner,

For Stone state and local public policy-making can, likely will, be different among communities with different sets-configurations of forces, constituencies and leadership (each will be a distinctive urban “regime”). A shared component of all urban regimes, however, at least in economic development policy, laid some configuration of a business-political interrelationship which is the usually dominant force in the making of economic development public policy. So…

Painting the picture of governance in Atlanta requires a broad canvas. Depiction of government structure is not enough. City hall has to deal with a powerful business sector and sharp limitations on its own authority. Thus, public officeholders have to come to terms with private interests, especially business interests…. The Atlanta story is, of course, not the story of every city.[1]

Our story begins around the end of World War II, but a short prologue regarding Atlanta’s past is helpful. To start, Atlanta, incorporated in 1847 and declared the state capital of reconstruction Georgia in 1868) did not seem much different from most cities in the South in that race relations were fairly destructive and hostile. Race riots in 1906, headquarters city for the KKK, a rigid Jim Crow politics, segregated black neighborhoods and, because of increased black migration into Atlanta in the 1940’s intensified black-white confrontation-both residential and employment. By 1920 the population was 200,000, but was 300,000+ by 1940.

Moreover, the city, designed as a rail hub, was not handling the automobile era well. Suburban sprawl had begun; traffic congestion was enormous, and the downtown was divided by railroad tracks… The city’s politics [moreover] was ill-suited to a bold response to the challenge of urban growth. Small businesses and ward-based interests increasingly lost out to larger businesses and interests that operated on a citywide scale … The character of downtown was changing [negatively] … as it became increasingly clear that downtown Atlanta was not assured of remaining as the economic hub of a spreading metropolis.[2]

The private sector was led by the Chamber which, as early as 1920, directly appointed one-third of the city’s planning commission and additionally another third was drawn from its membership. The Chamber (the jurisdiction’s lead EDO) embraced a Privatist-Progressive advocacy stance urging governmental reform along the lines of the “city efficient”. “A division within the business community [however] became evident. Large businesses, big money, and major property owners can afford to plan, take risks …. Small businesses cannot”.[3]

A major property owner (Charles Palmer), desiring to take advantage of the new Deal 1933 Public Works Administration, National Industrial Recovery Act, assembled a business coalition attempting to create the nation’s first slum clearance project of the 1930’s. “Palmer saw public housing as a means by which slums could be replaced and nearby property values protected”; opposing property owners, however, questioned the use of eminent domain in redevelopment (fearing it would be used to demolish their properties). Palmer was victorious and Atlanta was the nation’s first pioneer in using public housing (Techwood Homes which opened in 1936) as slum clearance.

In 1941 major property owners in downtown Atlanta (the Urban Land crowd) incorporated the Central Atlanta Improvement Association (CAP)[4] bypassed the Chamber, which generally followed the lead of the downtown association in salient downtown matters. “With CAP, the major players could launch long-term planning and engage in sustained action in support of a comprehensive program of redevelopment”[5]. Their public ally was “reformist” William B. Hartsfield (the Atlanta airport is named in his honor) who with “the personal support of major business leaders including Robert Woodruff, the Coca Cola magnate found by Floyd Hunter to be ‘the biggest man in town'”[6] was elected mayor in 1936. During the pre and World War II period Hartsfield led Atlanta along the lines of the city efficient movement.

To summarize Atlanta was ten years ahead of the time line we created in the above sections. By 1945, Atlanta already under private leadership (Chamber) had assumed dominance of the Planning Commission, commenced the nation’s first housing model variant of urban renewal (Urban Land crowd–without benefit of a reformist mayor), had in 1937 elected a reformist mayor (with cross-border business elite support), and by 1941 had created a privately-led (Urban Land crowd) downtown focused EDO which stood poised for action at the end of the war[7]. The best had yet to come, however.

Decentralization-suburbanization threatened Hartsfield’s electoral dominance in that the middle class exodus to suburban areas deprived him of the critical element of his voting constituency: the white middle class. He attempted four times to annex adjacent areas and failed each time. In 1946 a coalition of black-led institutions and activist groups (including such stalwarts as the NAACP and Urban League) launched a registration drive which increased eligible black voters by 700% to 27% of the city’s electorate. Hartsfield, a “conventional segregationist” thus far in his public life, moved gingerly to accommodate black demands–with the result that blacks supported him in a very difficult 1949 election (his fourth term).

A subtle, but critical environmental factor in black support of Hartsfield was the latter’s ability to convince key black leadership that he and his affluent white middle class base was a moderating force between the white working class and a racist, rural-dominated state government. To this end, Hartsfield backed the business-good government (League of Women Voters) 1951 Plan of Improvement and was able to induce sufficient black support to enable its passage. The emerging Atlanta Progressive Coalition was able not only to win the referendum, but to achieve two signification ratification victories in the Georgia legislature.

The Plan of Improvement was a game-changer for Atlanta. The Plan tripled the size of the city from 37 to 118 square miles and added an estimated 100,000 (most white middle class) to the city’s population. In addition the plan streamlined the city council and rationalized city-county functions. In the next elections, a black for the first time in Atlanta history was elected to city-wide office (school board) and won other city-wide electoral victories for the first time as well. This incremental progress continued through the fifties (Hartsfield integrated restrooms in Atlanta’s airport and public buildings, for instance)

For Stone, for us as well, the key lesson to appreciate was that a behind the scenes negotiating between Hartsfield, the dominant business elite, and the black leadership had developed and had become the backdrop for public policy-making in Atlanta. This appears to have been Hartsfield’s genius in wading through to forge agreement and compromise, imparting to Atlanta a distinctive “policy of racial moderation and negotiated gradualism … an isle of reasonableness in a sea of die-hard resistance”. This policy environment (regime if you will) extended, of course, to land use and urban redevelopment decisions as well. Atlanta, as with all the other large central cities of the post World War II United States confronted its version of the urban crisis described earlier. Infrastructure modernization, slum and blighted neighborhoods, affordable housing, deteriorated central business district, and traffic and congestion had to be tackled. Highways, breaking up neighborhoods-often poor and black transition zone neighborhoods, quickly became a wedge dividing the Atlanta-style Progressive Coalition.

The first phase of confronting the Atlanta-defined post war urban crisis centered on highways and extended to housing/neighborhoods. A business-inspired 1946 highway plan proposal, the Lochner plan, generated an intense process of public and private negotiation within the Coalition. Building highways and slum removal became linked with affordable new housing–to be available for blacks as well as whites (the reader should appreciate the segregationist character of these proposals: separate neighborhoods for whites and blacks had to be constructed for this housing). In this context bi-racial agreements were forged. How? According to Stone, all sides rejected the status quo and were willing to compromise to achieve desired changes.

Restructuring land use brought the elements of the coalition together into complex and repeated interactions that did indeed build a foundation for cross-racial understanding and habits of biracial cooperation. No one had a master plan of how cooperation could be managed … But negotiated settlements did emerge … a few were written and others were tacit.[8]

The second phase in Atlanta’s confronting their urban crisis was the implementing the 1949 Federal Housing Act urban renewal program. Urban renewal required eminent domain and a further restructuring of land use. “Whole neighborhoods could be changed or even eliminated. Although cleared sites could be used for public facilities … the process typically involved private development. Obviously, the implantation of urban renewal projects throughout the 1950’s would again tap into the ability of Atlanta’s biracial Progressive Coalition to reach compromise and sustain that compromise (and the projects) over a considerable period of time.

To carry out a [urban renewal] program required an ability to keep resources mobilized over a period of years in the face of considerable resistance. Urban renewal was a political process at heart, which attempted to disaggregate opposition while holding support together. … Once again, the Central Atlanta Association was the prime mover. Even before the 1949 Housing Act, it was working with the newly created Metropolitan Planning Commission … to rejuvenate and expand the central business district. In 1950, the city designated its first redevelopment project.[9]

As part of Atlanta’s implementation of its urban renewal program, it became necessary to reverse through amendment of the state constitution (an incredible political task in itself) and state-wide referendum a Georgia supreme court decision forbidding eminent domain for redevelopment. The Atlanta business community (and the Georgia Municipal League) demonstrated considerable muscle and dedication to urban renewal as a necessary solution to solving Atlanta’s urban crisis. Through the fifties the Atlanta-style Progressive Coalition was able to work through its fissures and produce a sustained set of compromises and agreements which permitted Atlanta to be, not only an urban renewal pioneer, but one of the most aggressive urban renewal programs in the nation.

The capstone of this Progressive Coalition, however, was not urban renewal. It was school desegregation. The Coalition, with its last hurrah from Hartsfield, negotiated in the last years of the fifties and 1960 a peaceful, gradual school desegregation which became the “pacesetter” for the South and an enormous public image boost in an era of frightening civil rights confrontation. “It was Atlanta’s finest hour”. As Hartsfield retired in 1961, he was replaced by the former President of the Chamber of Commerce, Ivan Allen Jr., who had supported school desegregation and was, in 1961 proposing “an ambitious agenda of redevelopment”…[10] for his future administration.

Whatever its merits and deficiencies, urban renewal had prospered in Atlanta and the success of urban renewal, in Stone’s mind and ours, was that it was led by a strong business elite and forged an incredible political coalition under a intermediary and visionary mayor that lasted for a generation. But this was not to be the experience of Boston…

[1] Stone, op. cit. p. ix.

[2] Stone, op. cit. pp. 14-15.

[3] Stone, op. cit. p. 15.

[4] The Central Atlanta Improvement Association, later the Central Atlanta Association, and today is the Central Atlanta Progress (and Downtown Improvement District in 1955). Central Atlanta Progress today is Atlanta’s principal private downtown EDO. (see atlantadowntown.com)

[5] Stone, op. cit. p. 16.

[6] Stone, op. cit. p. 17. Floyd Hunter, Community Power Structure (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1953).

[7] To be fair to Stone, an important factor explaining Atlanta’s politics and much of what emerged from the business-Hartsfield mayoral alliance was the weakening of ward-based politics and the incremental rise of blacks within the overall Jim Crow system. In particular, a black middle class evolved during these years which, not always successfully, learned how to function effectively in a political context. Also the demise of competing newspapers, leaving one to present views which we effectively unchallenged had the effect of unifying the consensus supporting redevelopment and its underlying close working relationship between Hartsfield and the business community. Atlanta had forged, in a largely unplanned and perhaps unconscious manner a unified city government in the pre World War II period.

[8] Stone, op. cit. p. 36.

[9] Stone, op. cit. p. 38.

[10] Stone, op. cit. p. 49.

=============

Atlanta & Southern Cities in the Age of Urban Renewal

Southern urban renewal does not faithfully mirror Big City urban renewal motivation or experience. First of all, the South had few cities of size[1], though, admittedly between 1940 and 1960 Texan cities in particular took off. New Orleans, the South largest city in 1940 held its own in the period, but it is remarkable that aside from it, Texas cities, Memphis, Louisville and Nashville, the cities of the southern heartland (Atlanta and Miami, Richmond, for example) were just cracking into the top ranks of American Big Cities. We were not mistaken in our previous chapters to characterize our “Big Cities” as those of the Northern/Midwestern hegemony. Accordingly, if the threat of northern-style decentralization was the inspiration behind urban renewal, we should not expect many southern cities to be similarly inspired. Also, the Policy World’s planning/housing/garden city backdrop that surrounded urban renewal debate in the North struck different chords in the South—and played a much less decisive role than it did for the Big Cities.

Just as there were those urban southerners in the 1920’s who … relieved some of the inequities of the biracial society, some entrepreneurs believed that dignity and healthful surroundings for mill workers would not necessarily trim profits and production. Planning… emerged as a tool to alleviate some of the hardships of mill existence. While planners in the North built garden suburbs, those in the South erected company towns. Charlotte planner Earle S. Draper devised some of the most progressive mill town plans during the 1920’s [including electricity, sewers and decent housing]. Chicopee, Georgia (1927), [in effect] a subsidiary of a New England textile firm, … included curvilinear, tree-lined streets, paved pedestrian walks, brick single-family homes, and a greenbelt buffer….[2]

Draper’s cities, make no mistake, were the rare exception to southern mill towns, but the larger point is the South did not contend with suburbs that threatened their place in the urban hierarchy. The opposite was occurring. Southern urban population growth of this period came from the hinterlands and rural areas to low-wage manufacturing firms rising in both cities and immediately outside of cities (later to be captured by annexation). In 1930, the Census Bureau reported the South as the least urbanized region (36.8%), but by 1960 the South climbed to nearly 60% urbanization (still, by far the nation’s least urbanized region). While the Great Migration exodus dominated our image of the region in these years, a second, less-noticed population movement from hinterland to urban areas also occurred—no doubt made more exaggerated by the predominately rural exodus. As a starting point to southern urban renewal, once again I remind the reader the South was at a different point in his evolution—during the early years of the Age of Urban Renewal many southern cities were urbanizing and beginning their way into the top ranks of American cities.

Atlanta’s Urban Renewal:

Bradley Rice believed Atlanta “boosterism” (our Privatist form of economic development) passed through four phases by the mid 1980’s[3]. Earlier chapters outlined its first phase to become the leading city in the state—a goal it achieved by the turn the nineteenth century. A second phase goals, to become the “metropolis of the South” culminated in 1929 with formation of Forward Atlanta, the chamber-led “shock and awe” municipal advertising machine that disrupted future American economic development. During the Age of Urban Renewal Atlanta embarked on yet another phase—to transform the city to national prestige and scale. That phase continued until1973 when Atlanta shifted into a significantly different and revolutionary system transformation—but that is a story for a later chapter.

The first three phases were “boosterist”, i.e. business elite, chamber-led initiatives. The chamber of commerce continued in this period as the city’s primary multi-function EDO, the author and driving power of growth in the metropolitan area. Since the very early days when it was settled by its northern railroad elites, the chamber housed the most important business elites of the city. As early as 1920, the chamber directly appointed one-third of the city’s planning commission and additionally another third was drawn from its membership. The Chamber brought the City Beautiful and the City Efficient to Atlanta. The chamber was home to Atlanta’s major corporations, not its small business.[4] The large corporation elite seemed from its very beginnings to hold a noticeably Progressive tilt. As early as booster second phase, at the 1895 Cotton States and International Exhibition, Booker T. Washington had delivered his famous “Atlanta Compromise” address urging racial harmony. While no heaven for is African-American residents, Atlanta was an oasis in the Redeemer South—and so it would prove to be in the Age of Urban Renewal.

So Atlanta displayed several important elements of our economic development policy model. It was Privatist in its style economic development operating full-tilt out of its chamber, yet, its dominant business culture was moderate Progressivist. Its chief motivation for economic development had consistently been associated with a drive to achieve the highest position attainable in the urban hierarchy relevant at the time. This was a luxury that was permitted by a growing, diversified economic base (in no small measure, Atlanta’s business would argue, due to Forward Atlanta advertising machine). Others would stress “Atlanta essentially functioned as a pipeline in the regional economy … not built on a water port, raw materials, or cheap labor. It was based primarily on a unique ability to respond to the economic organizational demands of the emerging rural market and to assist in the channeling of large investments by national and international interests into the region.”[5]

Atlanta: Housing and Slum Removal

In 1930, Atlanta with its 270,000 population was 32^nd in the nation, 11,000 residents more than its chief regional rival, 34^th placed Birmingham[6] entered the Age of Urban Renewal. A major downtown property owner (Charles Palmer) in 1933, desiring to create attractive low-income housing for residents in a neighborhood adjacent to the downtown, assembled a business coalition of business investors, formed a “limited dividend private corporation”, applied for and received New Deal Public Works Administration funds from the National Industrial Recovery Act. Using powers granted to limited dividend corporations, he conducted the nation’s first slum clearance project, Techwood Homes/later University Homes, opening in 1935. “Palmer saw public housing as a means by which slums could be replaced and nearby property values protected“; opposing property owners, however, questioned the use of eminent domain in redevelopment. Palmer was victorious. In 1938, he was elected chairman of the Chamber, and in the same year, successfully, founded the Atlanta Housing Authority. Affairs languished after this point and public housing limped into World War II. As late as April 1941, Palmer, commenting that half of Atlanta’s housing was “sub-standard or unfit for decent living” urged the city “to enact and enforce a modern housing code and to ‘get things going with better planning so as to ease traffic flow, open up tightly congested centers, and relieve the drab appearances of large segments of our city’”.[7]

By 1940 six additional projects capturing $21 million of federal funds provided about 4,000 units of public housing (segregated). By 1956 thirteen projects (not including Techwood) had been completed. At that time the Housing Authority ceased projects associated with public housing and concentrated on commercial/CBD urban redevelopment. Housing-related slum removal, particularly involving construction of public housing, outside of Atlanta was more difficult and noticeably more controversial. The fact that urban renewal grew out of housing-related slum removal in the North, but found tough sledding in the South, generally distinguished southern urban renewal programs from northern Big City. Support for public housing was generally absent and if found at all was restricted to few, often upper middle class, southern Progressives and public housing enthusiasts such as Palmer. Cynically, one might comment that if urban renewal was Negro removal, it would have enjoyed success in the South in the pre-Civil Rights, Jim Crow period. The more common tendency was cited by Greer[8] in an interview with a Tallahassee local official: “You’ve got two states, north and south. Those crackers up there [north] say ‘urban renewal is nothing but public housing, and you know what that is … But the Florida legislature is generally conservative. If you bring together the feds, housing, and Negroes, then you’ve had it’”.

William Hartsfield and the Chamber of Commerce

At this point (1936) William B. Hartsfield, arguably Atlanta’s most known mayor, was first elected to office. Hartsfield was no public houser and Palmer operated on his own dime. Hartsfield served from 1937 to 1961 (minus eighteen months). Since the early 1920’s he was Atlanta’s advocate for aviation, and he would continue that passion to Atlanta’s benefit through the war production and military base years. William B. Hartsfield who with “the personal support of major business leaders including Robert Woodruff, the Coca Cola magnate found by Floyd Hunter to be ‘the biggest man in town‘”[9] was elected mayor in 1936. During the pre and World War II period Hartsfield led Atlanta along the lines of a reformist city efficient approach. He successfully implemented several meaningful bureaucratic and structural reforms, thereby raising the capacity of what had been a rather weak municipal government.

The mayor occupied a weak-mayor city administration, as little formal bureaucracy as possible, and influence wielded through the city council/alderman. Mayor Hartsfield made things work in such a system, and the open and flexible spirit he brought to office had much to do with the epithet “the city too proud to hate”. The secret to understanding Mayor Hartsfield as an economic developer, however, is that he is less known for what he pushed through, than what he made possible for others to secure. He was never confused with La Guardia. But because of Hartsfield, Atlanta grew, and served as a beacon for what measure of civil rights progress could be attained in Georgia during those years. Still, the chamber of commerce, one must not forget, functioned as the economic development agency of the city, if not the metro area.

Even in these years, Atlanta depended on the chamber for access to professionals. By 1945, Atlanta allowed the Chamber to manage affairs of the Planning Commission, and by 1950 commenced the nation’s first housing urban renewal. The mayor never created a city office to oversee the chamber’s economic development activities until 1957. The Chamber in 1941 established a subsidiary, a downtown-focused EDO (Central Atlanta Improvement Association, CAP[10]), led by major downtown property owners who effectively bypassed the Chamber control.”With CAP, the major players could launch long-term planning and engage in sustained action in support of a comprehensive program of redevelopment” on their own initiative (and expense)[11].

The organization concentrated largely on public works improvements such as street and parking improvements and construction of viaducts over the downtown railroads. It also was instrumental in the passage of bond referenda. Although the membership consisted of the most influential downtown firms, and top community business leaders generally backed the organization, the seat of the business power structure remained the Chamber of Commerce.[12]

Through the 1930’s Atlanta, through annexation had been able to keep up with its peripheries:”Atlanta was not hemmed in by suburban municipalities. Most of the metropolitan growth was in unincorporated territory, especially in the affluent north Fulton County area” [Buckhead]”[13]. But during the Depression/War Years, annexation practically ceased, and over the next decade only three square miles were annexed. These were Hartsfield’s first three terms. That decentralization did not prod political leaders until the late forties and noticeably affect housing/urban renewal policy until a decade later suggests a significant regional difference from the northern Big Cities[14]. Atlanta, whose population was increasing at rates not typical of most southern cities, felt the effects of decentralization a bit earlier than other southern cities. In particular, decentralization increased his dependence on his African-American constituency.

Decentralization threatened Hartsfield’s electoral coalition; the middle class exodus weakened a critical element of his bi-racial constituency. He attempted four times to annex adjacent areas and failed each time. Hartsfield and the Chamber brought in Thomas Reed (National Municipal League) whose recommendation, city-county consolidation, eventually came to dead-end. Hartsfield returned to a number of aggressive legislative and referendum initiatives to annex surrounding suburbs—and through the entire decade lost every one. Two developments followed from this frustration.

Hartsfield since the beginning seems, the context of the time and place (segregation was still in law), been open to and fair in his dealing with African-Americans. Hartsfield was able to convince black leadership that he and his affluent white middle class base were a moderating force between the white working class and a racist, rural-dominated state government. That Hartsfield’s major opponent at the time was Lester Maddox, he had some credibility. He cultivated African-American leadership and incorporated it into his voting coalition. In 1946 a coalition of black-led institutions and activist groups (including such stalwarts as the NAACP and Urban League) launched a registration drive that increased eligible black voters by 700% to 27% of the city’s electorate. Hartsfield, a “conventional segregationist” thus far in his public life, moved gingerly to accommodate black demands–with the result that blacks supported him in a very difficult 1949 election. His relationship (including his ‘kitchen cabinet’) with Atlanta’s African-American community would establish his legacy and would ensure Atlanta a moderate and less violent civil rights era.

The Immediate Postwar

The first phase of confronting the Atlanta-defined post war urban crisis centered on highways and extended to housing/neighborhoods. A business-inspired 1946 highway plan proposal, the Lochner plan, generated an intense process of public and private negotiation within the Coalition. Building highways and slum removal became linked with affordable new housing–to be available for blacks as well as whites (separate neighborhoods for whites and blacks). In this context bi-racial agreements were forged. How? Behind the scenes negotiating between Hartsfield, the dominant business elite, and the black leadership became the backdrop for public policy-making in Atlanta, a distinctive “policy of racial moderation and negotiated gradualism … an isle of reasonableness in a sea of die-hard resistance“. From an urban redevelopment perspective, slum removal for freeway construction preceded CBD redevelopment and, whatever its deficiencies, involved neighborhood leadership.

The second development was, buoyed by its successful 1947 passage of the Metropolitan Planning Commission (MPC)[15]. The MPC was a product of Chamber, Greater Atlanta Association, the downtown Central Atlanta Improvement Association, and other business organizations. They convinced the state legislation to create the MPC with varying jurisdiction over areas throughout De Kalb and Fulton counties. Beginning operation in 1950 with shared funding (Atlanta 55%, Fulton 37% and De Kalb 8%), the agency quickly produced land use, water, transportation and sanitation plans. It set the route for an Atlanta beltway and built consensus for a radial expressway system. In later years, Cobb, Clayton and Gwinnett counties would be added[16].

As the reader will discover from reading the next couple of chapters, this is a rare instance of a central city, through its primary lead economic development organization, adopting and successfully pursuing a metropolitan planning strategy for managing the hinterland/metropolitan area. But, the chamber strategy was two-pronged. Also, pursued simultaneously with the MPC was a sizeable annexation action which would establish Atlanta with a sufficient population and tax base to support its national urban hierarchy objective. Looking forward, a serious attempt at further annexation by Atlanta in 1972 was stopped (although supported by the Atlanta chamber). By that time (1971), the MPC had been upgraded to the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC, state-legislated), whose board composed of the five county political leaders plus appointed ex-officio individuals) who tended to protect turf and resist incursions, while administering hospital, law enforcement and highway initiatives and grants. Its powers to serve as a metro government, compared to those of Portland, for instance, are more limited. Still, the Atlanta metro area had fashioned an instrument and policy boundaries which allowed its jurisdictions to play nicely in the sandbox.

The chamber in 1949 formed a blue-ribbon committee, the Local Government Commission, to fabricate a solution to decentralization. By this point, suburban counties[17] were resistant to encroachment by the central city. The report which emerged was dubbed “the Plan of Improvement”. Hartsfield and the League of Women Voters climbed on board, and secured a difficult to negotiate Georgia state authorization. The Plan of Improvement and was able to induce sufficient black support to win the referendum, but also to achieve two signification ratification victories in the Georgia legislature.

The Plan of Improvement was a game-changer for Atlanta. The Plan tripled the size of the city from 37 to 118 square miles and added an estimated 100,000 (most white middle class) to the city’s population. In addition the plan streamlined the city council (as well as other charter reforms) and rationalized city-county functions. In the next elections, a black for the first time in Atlanta history was elected to citywide office (school board) and won other citywide electoral victories for the first time as well. This incremental progress continued through the fifties (Hartsfield integrated restrooms in Atlanta’s airport and public buildings, for instance). Importantly, the Plan of Improvement took the edge of the suburban exodus by permitting a very significant annexation.

The main contours of the biracial agreements of that period (1946-1951) are clear. The white business elite wanted to move blacks and low-income whites away from the fringe of the business district … They also wanted no black expansion into north side Atlanta, and segregated residential life was a given. For their part, blacks wanted expansion land, including the opportunity to build new housing for both homeownership and rental units. Restructuring land use brought the elements of the coalition together into complex and repeated interactions that did indeed build a foundation for cross-racial understanding and habits of biracial cooperation. No one had a master plan of how cooperation could be managed … But negotiated settlements did emerge … a few were written and others were tacit.[18]

A second redevelopment phase commenced when the 1949 Federal Housing Act urban renewal program was approved. Urban renewal while requiring use of eminent domain and transfer of land to private ownership (requiring difficult to obtain state Supreme Court approvals), the opportunity was worth the risk: “Whole neighborhoods could be changed or even eliminated. Although cleared sites could be used for public facilities … the process typically involved private development. Obviously, the implantation of urban renewal projects throughout the 1950’s would again tap into the ability of Atlanta’s biracial Progressive Coalition to reach compromise and sustain that compromise over a considerable period”. Stone’s Regime Politics stressed the unifying role redevelopment of the CBD played in Atlanta’s drive for hegemony.

Indeed, Orr and Johnson observe “Stone shows how redeveloping Atlanta’s downtown came to occupy and maintain top billing on the city’s policy agenda. Downtown redevelopment was the central policy strategy for transforming Atlanta into an international city; a key goal of the business-leaning bi-racial coalition”.[19]

To authorize Atlanta’s urban renewal program, it became necessary (1) to reverse through amendment of the state constitution (an incredible political task in itself) and (2) win a state-wide referendum overturning an earlier Georgia Supreme Court decision forbidding eminent domain for redevelopment. The Atlanta business community (and the Georgia Municipal League) provided muscle and dedication to urban renewal in the successful campaigns that followed. As far as urban renewal went, however, Atlanta’s urban renewal program never really got off the ground as attention turned toward other policy areas during the fifties. The only major downtown building constructed in the fifties was the 26 story Fulton National Bank Building—the only skyscraper built from the Depression through 1960.[21]

The capstone of this Progressive Coalition, however, was not urban renewal. It was school desegregation. The Coalition, with its last hurrah from Hartsfield, negotiated in the last years of the fifties a peaceful, gradual school desegregation that became the “pacesetter” for the South and an enormous public image boost in an era of frightening civil rights confrontation. “It was Atlanta’s finest hour“. As Hartsfield retired in 1961, he was replaced by the President of the Chamber of Commerce, Ivan Allen Jr., who had supported school desegregation and was, in 1961 proposing “an ambitious agenda of redevelopment”…[22] for his future administration, after having defeated Lester Maddox for the office.

Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. (1961-1972)

Before he ran, Allen[23] devised his “Six Point Program” intended to serve as his platform and agenda. Schools, Freeways, Urban Renewal, Auditorium-Coliseum, Stadium, Rapid Transit and Forward Atlanta were its planks, and except for schools it was all economic development intended to propel Atlanta into the national arena. Son of the Ivan Allen, President of the Chamber, who had initiated, led and presided over the 1920’s creation of Forward Atlanta and its famous advertisement and recruitment campaign, Allen Jr. brought it back to full vigor, reestablishing Atlanta as the benchmark for economic development business recruitment.

Believing that if Atlanta was to achieve national status, it needed recruit major league sports to the city, Allen, on the flimsiest handshake with Charles Finley (owner of the Kansas City, later Oakland Athletics baseball), he secured private financing ($18 million) from a major local bank and built “on spec”, from scratch, on an urban renewal designated track of land, adjacent to downtown and three highways, in just fifty-one weeks after ground-breaking. When the stadium opened in 1965, Finley was long gone (he didn’t sell the “A’s” until 1980), but after law suits cleared up the following year, the Milwaukee Braves[24] moved in. Playing alongside of the Braves, were brand-new NFL’s expansion team, the Atlanta Falcons. Two years later, the National Basketball Team, formerly the St. Louis, now Atlanta Hawks arrived in town. Whatever its controversy within the profession, Allen and Atlanta demonstrated just how vital sports teams and stadia are to a major city in their competition for a better rank in America’s urban hierarchy.

During Allen’s administration, Atlanta economically and demographically exploded—both the CBD and the suburbs. Without question a “suburbanization simultaneous with CBD revitalization” occurred in the sixties, and would continue into the seventies. Not without issues, central city and suburbs were not engaged in a socio-economic arms race; working through the Metropolitan Planning Council, the two geographies evolved into a polycentric metropolitan area. The spectacular growth of the central city made this possible—Atlanta, unlike its northern Big City brethren was far from stagnant or declining. Affluence and growth, apparently, permitted Atlanta to evolve into its present day metropolis. Under Allen, the one-cent sales tax devoted to the development of MARTA, the public transportation system was approved.

In any event during the decade, Atlanta erected 34 buildings above fifteen floors. The most ambitious and well-known of these were those associated with the initial Peachtree Center complex patterned after the Rockefeller Center—which over the next two decades, accumulated much planning and architectural criticism, but served as the center for Atlanta’s considerable convention and tourist visitors. From the latter perspective, the project anchored what has become a mainstay of Atlanta’s economy and figured prominently in the 1996 Olympics.

The major urban renewal project of the decade demolished the huge Buttermilk Bottom residential area, constructed the Civic Center and Auditorium (giving rise of charges of ‘city beautiful’), the Georgia Power Headquarters and the Bedford Pine residential area (which remained largely empty until 1980). A second major urban renewal project doubled the size of the Georgia Tech campus and expanded its physical plant greatly (at a cost of thirty acres taken from the 1935 Techwood Project). The building boom continued through the 1970’s and 1980’s, leaving by 1970 a city of nearly 500,000 and a metro area exceeding 2.1 million. An estimated 80-90% of the construction financing originated from non-southern sources[25]. The role played by urban renewal in this growth is muted indeed, largely restricted to assembling and clearing residential slums, and transferring that land to private elites who build with their own money or somebody else’s.

]]

[1] In 1940, New Orleans was 15th (a bit higher then Minneapolis) and Houston, 21^st (a bit lower than Indianapolis), Louisville was 25th. In 1950. Houston was 14th, New Orleans 16^th, Dallas 22^{nd and} San Antonio 25^th. By 1960, Houston was 7^th, Dallas 14^th, New Orleans 15^th and San Antonio 17th, Memphis 22^nd and Atlanta 24^th.

[2] David R. Goldfield, Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers: Southern City and Region (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 188.

[3] Bradley R. Rice, “If Dixie Were Atlanta” in Richard M. Bernard and Bradley R. Rice. Sunbelt Cities: Politics and Growth since World War II (Eds) (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1983), pp. 31-32.

[4] C. N. Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946-1988 (Lawrence, University of Kansas Press, 1989), p. 15.

[5] M. Dale Henson and James King, “The Atlanta Public-Private Romance: An Abrupt Transformation” in R. Scott Fosler and Renee A. Berger, Public-Private Partnership in American Cities (Eds) (Lexington, MA, D. C. Heath and Company, 1982) p. 294.

[6] For those that can’t wait until the end of the section, in 1970 Birmingham was 48^th ranked just over 300,000, and Atlanta was 27^th placed with almost 500,000 residents. The figures, of course, are based on Census Bureau reports. More than two out of three metropolitan residents (715,000) lived in the central city.

[7] Mel Scott, American City Planning, op. cit., p.369.

[8] Scott Greer, Urban Renewal and American Cities: the Dilemma of Democratic Intervention (Center for Metropolitan Studies, Northwestern) (Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965), p. 66.

[9] C. N. Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946-1988, op. cit. p. 17. Floyd Hunter, Community Power Structure (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1953). It appears the two became close friends quickly—they were in no way alike, however. When first elected to mayor in 1936, the city was nearly bankrupt and early on Woodruff paid the entire city’s payroll for a year to bail out the city and get it back to fiscal shape.

[10] Central Atlanta Improvement Association, later Central Atlanta Association is today Central Atlanta Progress (and Downtown Improvement District 1955) Atlanta’s private downtown EDO (www.atlantadowntown.com).

[11] C. N. Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946-1988, op. cit. p. 16.

[12] M. Dale Henson and James King, “The Atlanta Public-Private Romance: An Abrupt Transformation” in R. Scott Fosler and Renee A. Berger, Public-Private Partnership in American Cities (Eds), op. cit., p.309.

[13] Bradley R. Rice, “If Dixie Were Atlanta”, op. cit., p. 34.

[14] In a series of articles during the 1960’s Leo Schnore constructed a model of suburbanization that dominated city-suburb writings until countered by Sunbelt scholars, such as Carl Abbott in the 1980’s. (See, for example, Leo Schnore, “The Socioeconomic Status of Cities and Suburbs”, American Sociological Review, 28, February, 1963, pp.76-85). Schnore’s model, using zones drawn from Chicago school neighborhood succession and aggregate analysis demonstrated that movement from zones associated with slum removal began in the twenties and accelerated after. “A number of independent studies indicated that it is the older, large SMSAs of the industrial heartland that were most likely to have reached the third of Schnore’s three stages by the 1950’s.” (Abbott: The New Urban America, op. cit., p.65). Schnore’s model called for smaller, younger cities to house the affluent and for low-income to reside in the suburbs. In the future that pattern would reverse itself, and the city would eventually house the urban poor, with suburbs “becoming the semi-private preserve of both the middle and upper strata”. In hindsight, suburbanization of younger and smaller southern and western cities had not commenced in force this early. Sunbelt suburbanization first commenced in the forties and became most pronounced during the sixties. The existence of a temporal lag in suburbanization among the nation’s regions did not seriously crack the dominant, all suburbs are identical motif, until after the turn of the century.

[15] Mel Scott, American City Planning, op. cit., pp. 442-443.

[16] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit., pp. 174-175.

[17] A factor of some importance in suburban county ability to resist Atlanta’s unwelcome advantages was their strong service delivery capacity legitimized by the Georgia constitution. Police and fire, schools and health, as well as planning and zoning positioned suburban counties well in their determination for local control.

[18]C. N. Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946-1988, op. cit. p. 36.

[19] Marion Orr and Valerie C. Johnson, “Power and Local Democracy: Clarence N. Stone and American Political Science”, in Orr and Johnson’s, Power in the City: Clarence Stone and the Politics of Inequality, (Eds) (Lawrence, University of Kansas Press, 2008), pp. 14-15. Orr, Johnson and Stone did not believe this agenda to be in the interests of the poor and, in the words of Stone “[downtown redevelopment] favors the interests of the upper-strata groups and disregards or harms the interest of the lower strata groups” (which is found in Regime Politics, p. 166).

[20] C. N. Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946-1988, op. cit. p. 38.

[21] Bradley R. Rice, “If Dixie Were Atlanta”, op. cit., p. 38.

[22] C. N. Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946-1988, op. cit. p. 49.

[23] Allen was the owner of an office supply firm, a member of the influential Commerce Club, who on his first day in office removed the “white” and “colored” signs from City Hall. Allen would be the only major southern politician to speak in favor of LBJ’s 1964 Civil Rights legislation. He served in the Army from 1942 to 1945.

[24] The sad irony is the Milwaukee Braves had been originally recruited from Boston to Milwaukee in 1953 when a new stadium, an urban renewal project, was completed. In Atlanta, the stadium was built on a forty-seven acre urban renewal designated/cleared site, but, as we reported, private funds built the stadium.

[25] Bradley R. Rice, “If Dixie Were Atlanta”, op. cit., p. 39.

======

policy system cuts this may be an abridged version of above

Southern Cities in the Age of Urban Renewal

Atlanta’s Urban Renewal:

Atlanta: Housing and Slum Removal

William Hartsfield and the Chamber of Commerce

The Immediate Postwar

The first phase of confronting the Atlanta-defined post war urban crisis centered on highways and extended to housing/neighborhoods. A business-inspired 1946 highway plan proposal, the Lochner plan, generated an intense process of public and private negotiation within the Coalition. Building highways and slum removal became linked with affordable new housing–to be available for blacks as well as whites (separate neighborhoods for whites and blacks). In this context bi-racial agreements were forged. How? Behind the scenes negotiating between Hartsfield, the dominant business elite, and the black leadership became the backdrop for public policy-making in Atlanta, a distinctive “policy of racial moderation and negotiated gradualism … an isle of reasonableness in a sea of die-hard resistance“. From an urban redevelopment perspective, slum removal for freeway construction preceded CBD redevelopment and, whatever its deficiencies, involved neighborhood leadership.

The Plan of Improvement was a game-changer for Atlanta. The Plan tripled the size of the city from 37 to 118 square miles and added an estimated 100,000 (most white middle class) to the city’s population. In addition the plan streamlined the city council (as well as other charter reforms) and rationalized city-county functions. In the next elections, a black for the first time in Atlanta history was elected to citywide office (school board) and won other citywide electoral victories for the first time as well. This incremental progress continued through the fifties (Hartsfield integrated restrooms in Atlanta’s airport and public buildings, for instance). Importantly, the Plan of Improvement took the edge of the suburban exodus by permitting a very significant annexation.

The capstone of this Progressive Coalition, however, was not urban renewal. It was school desegregation. The Coalition, with its last hurrah from Hartsfield, negotiated in the last years of the fifties a peaceful, gradual school desegregation that became the “pacesetter” for the South and an enormous public image boost in an era of frightening civil rights confrontation. “It was Atlanta’s finest hour“. As Hartsfield retired in 1961, he was replaced by the President of the Chamber of Commerce, Ivan Allen Jr., who had supported school desegregation and was, in 1961 proposing “an ambitious agenda of redevelopment”…[22] for his future administration, after having defeated Lester Maddox for the office.

Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. (1961-1972)

Southern-Fried Urban Renewal?

Comparing Atlanta to Philadelphia and Boston, I at least, think the “plot” is different. Northern urban renewal is not telling the same story Atlanta presents. This is interesting, because of all the southern cities Atlanta is commonly felt to be the least southern, being instead, if anything, the capital of the New South. Yet even in Atlanta, urban renewal seems to occupy a somewhat different function and legacy than the northern Big City experience. Two differences, one obvious, the other more subtle spring to my mind: time underscores both.

At the end of our observation (late sixties) the cities are in different spots in history. Philadelphia and Boston are considerably older, and the weight of the historical industrial city seems overwhelming. They are battling population decline and, paradoxically, Great Migration inflow. They are in process of changing their demography, culture and politics. In a few short years, by the middle seventies, they will be perceived an in almost hopeless decline, having been torn asunder by riots and intensified suburbanization—as well as implosion of the economic base. That is obviously not the “feel” or the legacy of Atlanta—as we end by asserting the CBD (and suburban) commercial boom continues for a generation, never mind decade. The rise of the Sunbelt, of course, lay ahead, the collapse of the Rustbelt also. The Age of Urban Renewal occurred in the transition era to regional change. But more precisely, the Big Cities and their relevant Policy World carved out public housing, slum clearance, blight and urban renewal for their own purposes and needs; cities not in the same historical “place” used it for their own purposes and needs. Urban renewal may (or may not) have looked much the same in operation, but the ends toward which it was employed varied by region.

An oft-times criticism of urban renewal my reading has uncovered, is that urban renewal is dismissed as a mere “city beautiful” initiative. That critique is seldom levied against northern Big Cities, but used against western and southern cities. In my mind, the city beautiful metaphor is reasonably valid for many cities in these latter regions. In the Age of Urban Renewal western and southern cities are constructing a CBD for their version of a modern city. Most of these cities are for the first time achieving sufficient scale to justify their inclusion into Big City rank. Perhaps as this and the next two chapters suggest, this version of a modern CBD rests more comfortably on a polycentric metropolitan area than its Big City northern counterparts, struggling to use urban renewal to retain primacy, achieved.

The second time difference is, I suspect, without realizing it, is that we have lost the better part of a decade or more between Pittsburgh, Newark or Philadelphia, even Baltimore in our discussion of Atlanta’s urban renewal. Northern Big Cities leaped, mostly unsuccessfully, to take advantage of the 1949 Housing Act. Atlanta doesn’t enter into that picture into the middle 1960’s under the Allen administration. This will prove common in the South and West. Despite approving enabling legislation early on, many southern and western cities did little (for a variety of reasons) in developing programs and projects until the later fifties and early sixties.

Early and middle sixties urban renewal is not identical to 1954 urban renewal—the latter is still infused with its housing and neighborhood slum removal heritage and is almost experimental in its application. Atlanta is using urban renewal during the Great Society-Model Cities years. The urban renewal of Atlanta may have demolished a slum neighborhood, but, rightfully or wrongly, it built institutions associated with the CBD in its place. Even in a southern city with a major public housing heritage, urban renewal proponents consciously set that heritage aside in favor of a pure CBD development strategy. It took the 1974 Community Development Block Grant for that to happen in the northern Big Cities.

A third regional difference is the more open and obvious role large corporation elites played not only in leading urban renewal, but actual governance of the city. In that many link large corporate elites with Privatist (and worse, dare we say Neo-Liberal) beliefs and motivations, the sincere Progressive tendencies of Atlanta’s business elites can be off-putting. That is certainly reflective of the Atlanta political culture and it will be placed in sharp contrast to equivalent large corporation elites in Dallas and Houston. But in each of these cities, the large corporation elites openly governed, and dominated our economic development policy agenda and structures. There are few veneers or veils hiding corporate influence in these policy systems—the redevelopment agency is more an instrument than the critical link between private and public elites that it is in the North. What is not obvious is that future chapters will describe how this corporate elite-led system will soon collapse and be turned on its head—and CBD growth will largely, but noisily continue.

These and other differences will be considered as we present more snapshots of urban renewal in other southern cities—and in later chapters western cities as well. In this spirit, this chapter will in the next section examine other important examples of urban renewal in southern cities.